Where are they going?
Long term demographic decline. Primarily death rate outpacing birth rate and immigration. It’s not catastrophic and white people aren’t going to go extinct in the US or anything, but by 2060 white numbers will drop by about 10 percent in absolute numbers and due to expanding population much more in relative percent. Among yoing consumers the decline will be more drastic. Bottom line is that if your eggs are in the white basket, you’ve got long term problems and probable revenue losses.
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I didn’t know that!
Yeah - the decline in golf popularity has been going on for some time now. My impression has been that golf simply takes too long to play, and too much protracted effort to be decent at it. 4+ hours to play 18 holes is quite a time commitment. And I expect the decline to continue as Tiger ages and becomes less relevant (inevitable, sooner or later).
Many courses have been trying different ways to appeal to a broader base. Many try “foot golf”, where people kick a soccer ball into a larger hole. I’ve seen scoter like “golf carts.” And some places promote night golf and partial rounds of 6 holes or so. Not sure any of those have been terribly successful other than as an attempt to wring additional $ out of the existing facility. And there are fancy driving ranges like Top Golf, where you aim at various targets.
For many individual golf courses, the main question is whether the real estate is more valuable used for other purposes - most likely development.
More on topic w/ the thread, tho, ISTM that it has become increasingly easy to spend money with little thought. More and more things are set up as automatic withdrawals. Compared to the ancient practice of writing a check, on-line and phone expenditures are becoming easier and easier, and more and more reactive rather than intentional.
I think at least part of the decline of golf–and boating, and things like that–is that they are expensive, and people don’t want to put all their recreation budget in one thing. They’d rather be able to travel different places, go out to eat, have an Xbox, than basically commit to one model of recreation. And the country club model was the epitome of mindless expenditure: you pay a fee, and you pay more fees for everything you actually do or eat, but they put it all on your tab and you pay one big lump monthly or quarterly.
AFAIK, it’s a time and price thing. My friends and I played golf in college a lot and had an absolute blast. We weren’t any good, we all had hand-me-down and/or garage sale clubs, and got the factory second or used golf balls. We also played on the campus course, and “twilight”, or around summertime, “super twilight”, where for $5 a person we could get 9 holes in before it got too dark to play.
Fast forward a couple of years and we were all out of school. None of us kept it up- it wasn’t a status or networking thing to play golf like it seems to have been for our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, so we were all unwilling to put up with the BS- it was usually very regimented- tee-times were like 10 minutes apart, it cost like $4n0 to play, and if you were casually deciding to play a round, you were almost always stuck with the really early tee-times. And a lot of courses have dress codes and other stupid-ass stuff like that.
So rather than being a few hours spent playing leisurely golf with your buddies in fall/spring/summer evenings for no real money, it became something you had to wake up early for, dress a certain way, get pestered by old farts who want to play through because you lost your ball and are taking too long to find it, and you paid $50 for this privilege and feel annoyed because you stink at it for so much money. No thanks.
I also think that its association with the country club set hasn’t helped it either- people don’t really aspire to that like they used to, and it’s now a negative association.
Cost is all relative.
-You can get a useable set of clubs for only $2-300. My impression is that many people pay that for a single piece of recreation equipment.
-I can’t remember the last time I bought a golf ball. Of course, I don’t lose many, I’ll play any pro-line ball, and I know where to find them.
-The course I play at most often has no dress code - other than that you have to keep a shirt on. Even at a fancy club you generally don’t need any special clothes other than a collared (or other athletic) shirt, and generally no jeans/cutoffs.
-While $50 can sound pricey, I suggest it is not so much when factored over the 4-hr+ length of a round (unless you are comparing it to something with no entrance fee, like hiking in a forest preserve, or playing softball in a park.) If you look, you can always find specials. In smaller markets, there are often extremely cheap “goat tracks.” Sure, most courses have restricted openings due to leagues, permanent tee-times, outings, and such. And early morning/afternoon discounts are no different than “surge pricing.” I’m often impressed at how quickly people spend relatively large amounts of money - such as eating/drinking out. $50 for 4 hrs does not impress me as too much in comparison.
Sure, you can do it super cheap, but that has nothing to do with how the upper middle class traditionally plays it. For lots of people, the point wasn’t getting in a game of golf at the lowest possible price point: it was about belonging to a community, have a nice country club, having nice golf stuff to show off, working with a pro to get better, taking vacations to golf on cool new courses and coming back to your golfer friends to talk about it. That particular super-expensive hobby–a hobby that consumes much of your lifestyle–is in steep decline. It’s worth noting in a thread about whether or not expensive hobbies are on the rise to note that some are in decline and it may be as much about shifting where people spend money as what they spend money on.
I mean, all those young people hobbies you talk about have a bargain basement version, as well. If you’re gonna compare cheapest-possible-golf to being a foodie, you gotta compare it to people that specialize in taco trucks and farmer’s market bargains, not people who check out fancy restaurants.
True, although this example is just an example of expectations/lifestyle creep.
Because the free TV service for life that we used to have still exists! You can still get an antenna and get free over the air television. But now it’s in HD and the TV was cheaper to boot. You just have to make do with the same 2-10 channels there used to be instead of 300.
The primary way in which we spend more these days and don’t get much more is housing. Because in most urban and semi-urban markets the supply is tightly constrained and we aren’t building enough new homes for young people.
I doubt if it has that much directly to do with people’s race. Golf has been a big growth sport in recent decades in Asia, and this carries over IME at least to a significant degree in Asian communities in the US with a lot of foreign-born members, like the heavily Korean area near me.
And while I agree younger people in the US are less interested in golf as a rule, I wonder if stats would show this has a large racial component to it especially if you factor out income.
The way people spend money changes over time whether racial demographics do or not. And I can’t think offhand of a major new type of spending that’s particularly driven by non-white identity at a given income level. Whereas the aggregate figures clearly show Americans aren’t getting a lot more thrifty even if some well known expensive hobbies are in decline. That also goes BTW for income inequality. Under the stereotypical view of spending and saving by income level, more income to the higher percentile people would mean a higher overall savings rate. That hasn’t been the case particularly (though the US savings rate is still a little higher now than it was pre-crash, and exactly how much less equal income distribution has become is subject to some debate though qualitatively it’s been the trend).
I’m not talking about playing golf the absolute cheapest way possible. Instead, I’m talking about spending money wisely.
I’ve played quite a bit of golf in my days - from Medinah, to resort golf, to goat tracks. And have been pretty solidly middle class throughout. Being middle class (and more relevant to my OP than this golf sidetrack), I have always considered price when recreating - as well as in all areas of my life.
To me - and most of my friends - there is just so much golf that you can easily play for >$50 - with a little planning - that it makes no sense to spend more. A couple of times a year, we’ll splurge on a fancier, pricier round.
Tho I have played A LOT of golf, with a lot of guys who all played a lot of golf, I’m sure no more than 10 or so of those guys ever belonged to a CC.
Sure, I could’ve joined a CC, but I never wanted to play the same course all the time. Tho I no longer golf as much as I used to (5x/week at one point), the goal was always to spend my money so that I got what I considered the biggest bang for the buck. If it costs half as much to tee off at 4:00 p.m. as it does at 3:52, why not save the money? And there really is no need to keep spending money on new clubs or fancy togs.
I lived in Valparaiso, IN for a while. Membership at the local CC was - IIRC - <$5k all in, including food, etc. I would’ve done that if my wife were there with me (temporary assignment.) Instead, I paid something like $3500 for unlimited golf at a better course nearby. If I were stupid, I could’ve just paid daily fees at the course I played at and ended up spending considerably more. But why would I do that?
I’m not arguing that golf can’t be played inexpensively. I’m not talking about you at all. I’m arguing that for some people, it was a very expensive hobby, and that that set of people are in decline. Are you arguing that no one ever played on the fancy courses or joined the expensive clubs? I’m suggesting that at least some of the young professionals who seems to be spending a lot of money on Whatever may well be the children of professionals who spent a ton on golf (or boating, or a vacation home, or a little airplane, or a big RV, or hell, fishing).
I’ve no doubt you and your friends are quite frugal. But SOMEONE was paying for those pricier tee times. Losing the player that weren’t paying much anyway isn’t what’s causing problems for golf.
I always had the impression that back in the day, it was one of the very few social hobbies available to men outside of just hanging out in a bar. So there was a lot of masculine socializing done on the golf course, and a whole lot of social and career networking going on. I’m guessing there were a lot of golfers who weren’t in it for the golfing, so to speak. And with all that came an opportunity to display one’s status through expensive clubs, equipment, what club you play at, etc…
Those reasons have gone away for the most part (why, is probably a whole different discussion), so the remaining golfers are the hobbyists who like playing golf enough to either spend the cash to play it old-school, or the ones like **Dinsdale **who play it on the cheap because they love the game. (there are probably industries where it still is the main social activity, but I don’t know what those are)
For me, it was great fun when it was cheap and convenient, and there was a group of friends to play with, no matter how bad we were. But once it became inconvenient and expensive to participate in something that I was horrendous at, my interest waned pretty hard. Plus, my group of buddies kind of scattered to the winds after college- even though 3 of us ended up in the same city, it was tough enough to get together that we didn’t want to bother with golf when we did.
One other factor, is the change in tax laws. Used to be able to write off a lot of CC expenses.
Here is an article discussing average expenditures. Average golfer spend $2776 in 2015. Is that a lot or not? Compared to other recreation? I dunno. Probably.
That and other sites all agree that rounds played/courses/golfers are all down pretty drastically.
This site says the average “consumer unit” spent $2900 on entertainment in 2016. So yeah, $2776 on golf would be a big chunk of the entire entertainment budget.
Man, do I have to apologize to myself for participating in this extended hijack? 
I don’t think it’s a hijack. It’s a pretty important qualification–some expensive hobbies are on the rise and others are waning.